Tuesday, August 27, 2013

In
his new book, Zealot, Reza Aslan
claims that his unbiased, objective, historical scholarship proves that the
real Jesus was a violent revolutionary bent on retribution and holy war.This conclusion is exactly the opposite
of the results of the unbiased, objective, historical scholarship of someone
like J. D. Crossan, who says the real Jesus was a non-violent Cynic
philosopher.

It
all depends apparently on which unbiased, objective, historical assumptions and
method you choose to start with.That governs which parts of the gospels you decide are “historical fact,”
and which you can discard as “later fictional additions.”If you start off your unbiased,
objective, historical research with the entirely subjective set of biases and
procedures demanded by historical science, then you will identify as “historical”
whatever those biases predetermine.Aslan and Crossan have the same method; they just make different initial
decisions about the criteria for what is and isn’t “historical.”Hence, the results: one “true,
historical Jesus” looks like a vague flower-child, and another looks like a
Taliban fighter.

In
the end we get a product that claims to be “true,” “objective,” “unbiased,” and
“historical,” but which is really just what we end up with when we force a text
through that particular set of arbitrary filters.That’s all.We are
left not with the “true, historical Jesus,” but with Crossan’s Jesus, Aslan’s
Jesus, Meier’s Jesus, or any of the other attempts at this project, going back
to Strauss in the 19th century, or further back to Thomas
Jefferson.Jefferson famously took
a razor to the gospels and sliced out everything that did not seem reasonable to
him.And so it has been ever
since.Scholars use whatever
sophisticated methodology they choose in order to extract from the gospels the
Jesus they want, and leave the rest as the fictional additions of later
writers.

I
believe it was Robert Funk who said “beware of finding a Jesus congenial to
you,” and then spent the last part of his career finding, and publicizing, a
Jesus congenial to him.

My
hope is that Aslan’s book will open some eyes, especially among “progressives”
who are most prone to be tempted by such shiny objects.There is no “objectivity” in this work;
everyone approaches it with a bias expressed in their methodology.More importantly we need to lose the
hypothesis that the “Jesus of history” and the “Christ of faith” are two
different figures who can be cut apart and examined separately.The New Testament only gives us Jesus
Christ.Everything in the New
Testament is presented through the powerful lens of the resurrection.There is and can be no reliable
methodology which can be applied to extract the “historical Jesus” from this
unified, though multifaceted, portrayal.To attempt it results only in a body which has been severed into two
incomplete and dead pieces.

The
Quests for the Historical Jesus were Modernist projects based on Modernist
values and assumptions.These are
not only the faith in objectivity and the identification of the historical with
the true, two things we now know are wrong.But at least as important is it rooted in the veneration of
the expert, the “scholar”, the (almost exclusively) white male scientist who is
above all and the measure of all.It should not surprise us then that the Jesuses these people dream up
bear a marked resemblance to their creators’ fantasies about themselves.Every new Jesus tells us more about the
desires and fears of the scholars involved, than about Jesus.

As
James Cone points out in his new book, The
Cross and the Lynching Tree, if you want to know the real Jesus find him
among his poor, courageous, and victimized followers,
not among the safe and the privileged, the tenured and the published.

Sunday, August 25, 2013

If
a church has a sense of its own mission, and a significant number of members are obstructing it,
the church probably has to lose them.Or it could continue in the familiar template of a long, slow decline.

It
is healthier to lose unhappy dissenters, than to continue to muddle through in
disunity.An organization that is
spending too much of its energy holding itself together is not going to have
enough energy to do what it is called by God to do in the world.

A
smaller, focused, committed, intentional congregation is more effective than a
larger congregation that doesn’t agree on, and therefore can’t say, who they
are or what they are called to do.An effective organization is much more likely to grow.It could find itself with more members
than it had before.While a
larger, divided congregation is more likely to remain in a downward spiral.

I
have seen a shrinking, small church suddenly lose 25% of its members, only to
turn around and show gains within a year because it was no longer hindered by
those unhappy members from doing its mission.That church is now larger than it was before the split.

So,
if you have unhappy members in your church, allow them to move on to where they
can be happy.If you are unhappy
where you are, move on to where you can be happy.

AND
FEAR NOT!!!A happy and united
congregation has a better chance to see significant growth, than one that has
unhappy people holding it back.

Oh, and churches have to develop a strong
enough sense of themselves and their mission so that the members have something
to be happy, or unhappy, about.

So
the choice for many churches is: a) lose a lot of people quickly, and retain
the possibility for growth, or b) continue to lose everyone, but slowly, and
have no possibility for growth.

Sunday, August 18, 2013

Sometimes
when I refer to America as a “democracy” someone will “correct” me in a
patronizing and superior way, saying that, no, America is not a democracy, it is a republic,
and that I should read the Constitution.

I
have read the Constitution.Whether
it describes a “republic” or a “democracy” is a matter of semantics. I could find neither word used anywhere in
it.Conservatives who were afraid
of democracy preferred to call it a “republic,” and still do.Certainly the Constitution does not
give us anything like a pure democracy, which would be unwieldy on a national
scale even today, let alone at the end of the 18th century.What we have is a representative
democracy in which the will of the people is expressed through the election of
representatives.

The
word “republic” gets sanctimoniously thrown around as a way of diminishing the
democracy emphasis and replacing it with the idea that only some select few
really are trustworthy enough to have power.When the Constitution was ratified, remember, only white,
male, property owners could vote.Plus, the economy of much of the country was based on the uncompensated
labor of slaves.In fact, the original
document does its best to protect this execrable and obscene institution. Republic advocates point to these
circumstances as proof that a democracy was not intended by the
Constitution.Rather, they say,
the framers envisioned a paternalistic system in which a select few – white,
male, property owners – managed the affairs of the many.Something like that is what they define
as a “republic.”This is what they
want to go back to.

Fortunately,
the ink on the Constitution was barely dry before 10 amendments were added to
it.Some hold that these
amendments “limit government,” which is true.But what they mainly
limit is the ability of government to restrict the rights of people who are not white, male, property owners.These amendments protected the rights
of more and more people, and moved us dramatically in the direction of an inclusive
democracy.We have been continuing
on the same trajectory ever since.Most amendments to the Constitution have had the effect of broadening
the rights of the people (such as amendments I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII,
IX, X, XIII, XIV, XV, XVII, XIX, XXI, XXIII, XXIV, XXVI).That means that the proprietary rights
of the privileged class of white, male, property owners have also steadily been
diminished.

And
make no mistake, this is what the hysteria and paranoia is all about.The self-serving illusion of the “republic”
managed by benevolent white, male, property owners is becoming increasingly
untenable.By 2050, whites will
not be the majority in this country.It is already impossible to win a national election without some support
from non-whites.They think they
can reverse this tide by restricting voting rights.But as we saw in 2012, this only makes people more steadfast
in exercising those rights, even if they have to stand in line for 8 hours to
do it.They think they can reverse
this tide by gerrymandering Congressional and legislative districts, allowing
minorities to maintain their grip on power.This will work for a while.But eventually the people who do the work, create the
wealth, pay the fees, and spend the money will rise up and put a stop to it.

The
so-called “republic” of privileged white, male, property owners that some wish
to recover or reinstate basically failed, nearly at its inception.It failed, not from some conspiracy,
act of treachery, or external coercion.It failed because it was unsustainable, not to mention unjust and
unreal.For no matter how some may
try to point out how great things where in 1789 (for people like them), the
rest of us are incurably infected with the blessed disease of democracy.We do believe that God created all of us equal.We do believe that all of us are entitled to a say in decisions that are made.And we do believe that we are all in
this together to care for, support, and encourage each other.And we reject the idea that some are
more equal than others.

Friday, August 16, 2013

(I
have found that this analogy is effective in getting the attention and prying
just slightly open the minds of even the most jaded and cynical members of confirmation
classes.)

A
few years ago there was a minor fad over a book called The Magic Eye.The Magic Eye was a collection of
computer-generated images that, at first glance, appear to be an array of
nearly random shapes and often colors.A more careful examination reveals certain subtly repeated patterns.But the images don’t look like anything
in themselves, except maybe a kind of abstract art.The viewer is supposed to stare at the image and intentionally
let their eyes relax and unfocus, until seeing a dual image.Then comes the “magic” part.After an indefinite period of time,
gradually a three-dimensional image
resolves into view.Instead
of looking at apparently random colors and shapes, you are viewing an unrelated
three-dimensional form.It is
quite striking.

What
happens, I am told, is that the viewer’s brain gradually decodes the 3-d form
embedded in the image.The image
itself, of course, does not change.It is printed on the page in ink.What changes is the perception of the viewer, enabling them to see a
form that is initially invisible… but is always there.Something inside the viewer changes,
and a form appears to emerge out of the printed image.

While
this is happening, that is, while we are staring at the page, all we see is the
blurred, dual image.But then, as
the 3-d form starts to resolve, we might even comment, saying, “It’s coming!”
because that’s what the emerging perception feels like.It feels like something that wasn’t
there is now beginning to “arrive;” something is showing up that wasn’t there
before.This is not what is
happening, of course.What is actually
there on the page doesn’t change.But we describe it this way because it feels like what is on the page is
changing.

No
amount of empirical analysis, no careful deconstruction of the shapes and
colors on the page, will lead an observer to conclude that there is a 3-d form
embedded in them.Maybe, if
informed that such a form is encoded therein, a person might, with the aid of a
computer to do the esoteric math, discover it.But you’d have to be open to the possibility and then
actively looking for it.

My
point is that in order to see the form, the viewer
has to change.And the viewer
perceives this change as a change in the image, interpreting it as something
coming into it.

This
is an analogy for the spiritual life.The Presence of God in our world is invisible to the casual, superficial
observer.It cannot even be
deduced from a careful analysis of the empirical data.In order to see it, we have to relax
and be present, allowing a subtle shift in our perception.Then the Presence may appear to
emerge.It is perceives as
something that initially appears to be “coming,” even though it has been
embedded/encoded in the world all along.

Not
everyone actually sees the form when they look at a Magic Eye image.Some
folks can’t do it.For them, it
remains a mystery testified to by those who have had the experience.Seeing the form remains aspirational
for them.Or: they can conclude that the seers of the form must be lying,
delusional, superstitious, or mentally ill. Since they can’t see it, and reality is empirical and objectively
verifiable, they can only conclude that the form isn’t real.They might mock those who claim to see
something otherwise invisible, and dismiss the whole Magic Eye thing as a scam.

Of
course, this is the way many simply dismiss God and the spiritual life
altogether.If they can’t see it,
it’s not there.

But
people need to be reminded that that there could be something real out there
that we can’t perceive until something inside of us changes.And when Christians say something like “Come,
Lord Jesus,” they are not necessarily asking for something that is not here to
arrive.But they are asking for
the ability to perceive something that is already here and always has been.